Update on Season 5

In short, delay. 😦

In long, we’ve processed all the images and are uploading them onto the Zooniverse servers. However, it’s taking a long time. A really long time. Since Season 4, the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute (MSI) has switched over to a new system, and it seems like the upload time from this new system is painfully slow. We’ve uploaded over 25% of the images, but it’s taken a couple days uploading non-stop. So best estimate is mid to late next week for when they’ll all be uploaded. We’re trying to coordinate with the staff at MSI to see if they can increase upload speeds for us, but no guarantees.

(Man, I wish we had some images of turtles or snails or sloths or something from Serengeti… Wait! I know what’s slow — stationary, actually.)

Waiting…

Meanwhile, you can read a guest blog post that I wrote over at Dynamic Ecology. Dynamic Ecology is read by ecologists, so my blog post introduces the concept of citizen science (and Snapshot Serengeti, of course) to professional ecologists who may not be very familiar with it. One question that comes up in the comments is: can you do citizen science if you don’t have cool, awesome animals? Like, what if you have flies or worms or plankton instead? I think the answer is yes. But feel free to give your perspectives in the comments there, too.

One response to “Update on Season 5”

Ofcourse you can, if e.g. a certain slug appeals to a scientist enough to want to write a book about it, it must appeal to heaps of citizen scientists. And also there are a lot of people out here who want to be useful and maybe are denied this. Citizen scientism can be very rewarding, if there is also interaction, like fora, and feedback like conclusions etc. Also little extras/rewards can help, like free downloadable pics, a thank you every now and things like that.